Davin knelt, panting, in the midst of five ruined bodies. He managed to bludgeon each into submission, a pile of grey flesh like rotten logs. His clothing, arms, and face were caked with zombie sludge, blood, mud—all except two streaks trailing from his eyes down either cheek.

“That…was..fun,” he breathed. His eyes met mine, sparkling in the moonlight. He held up his left arm, leaning on the shotgun like a crutch with his right. A red gash cut across the forearm where one of the things bit into his skin. “That last little bastard got me…”

I looked at Dan. His face flushed white. “No…”

“You gotta do it, fellas. I’m toast.” Davin shook his head. “What a way to go, huh?” He grinned, white teeth flashing from a mask of blood and offal.

“No.” Dan dropped his gun. “I can’t.”

Davin looked at me. My hands trembled around the gun. I pushed the stock into my shoulder. The trigger was cold against my finger.

“Do it.”

Davin’s body toppled backward with the thunder.

I looked away, ashamed to fear the blood and a little worried some more rot-bags smelled the fresh blood or heard the shot and would swarm the place. Dan didn’t move for a few minutes; he just hunched on grass and stared at Davin’s body. The moonlight filtered through a few drifting clouds, casting a somber pall of blue over the scene while the wind whispered across the jagged tops of nearby trees. After a minute, I heard this sob, starting low like a moan. I clutched my shotgun with white knuckles and turned to Dan. He was crying.

“Stupid bastard. Stupid, fucking bastard.” He drew one foot back as if to kick Davin’s body but stopped, rubbing a sleeve across his face. “We gotta get him outta here,” he said, almost choking on the words.

I looked back at the corpse. His face was ruined, but in my mind’s eye I saw Davin as he was alive. I saw his cockeyed smile and confident flicker in his eye. I knew what would happen if we carried him back to the compound.

“We can’t take him back.”

“What?”

I thought of Mom; the last time I saw her they doused her with fuel, dropped their torches, and her skin cracked and blackened, sending an angry plume of black snaking into the sky. Maybe the booze did it, worked on my stomach and my brain, but I knew we couldn’t bury him out here—the zombies would make a meal of his remains before the day was out. We couldn’t take him back with us either. “I’m not letting those paranoid bastards make a little bonfire of his body. He didn’t want that.”

“Are you nuts?” Dan slumped into a pew. “Those rot-bags will chew him up if we don’t.” Silence filled the little church before he spoke again. “What the hell do you want to do, stuff him in one of those damn grease barrels?”

I reached for Davin’s gun. The stock was battered now, blotted with dried blood and mud, but I could make out the groove Davin had carved with his knife. I counted thirteen older marks from his father and grandfather. Five more tallies for the dead at our feet would make nineteen. That gun had been his grandfather’s, passed down for generations.

“No, we send him out right.”

Dan helped me drag a few pews into a pile, and then I turned over a little table at the center of our kindling. Dan was stronger than me, so he hoisted Davin’s body over his shoulders, lugged him to the front of the church, and laid him out on the table. I pried open our remaining jar of booze and doused his body with it. It tasted like shit, so I knew it was strong enough to burn well. Poking my hand in my jeans, I fished around for the lighter, Dad’s old thing with the initials engraved on the side.

I snapped the lighter open against my leg. With a quick flick of my thumb a small flame lurched toward the dark ceiling of the church, and I touched the fire to the edge of the table, watching it explode as a magnificent pyre fit for our friend.

We stood outside the building for a while, chased back by the heat. I wanted to wait until every beam in the church blackened, devoured by the orange fire, and collapsed on itself. Dan and I were silent. The world was silent. As the fire melted into an ash pile, we turned and stumbled down the hill. On our way back to the wall, I glanced off into the sunrise. We spotted a zombie, a lanky thing stumbling away from us down a quiet street—he hadn’t come with the others, and how many more shambled about in the darkness I would never know. It faced the other way and didn’t see us. Dan raised his gun but hesitated. “Aw hell,” he muttered as he dropped the gun.

Behind the zombie, the eastern sky started to balloon with pinks and oranges, and I took it in, trying to memorize the look of the morning sun cresting a hill. You couldn’t see a sunrise like that in the compound. I realized that the rest of my life would be spent behind the wall, and understood why Davin had charged headlong into the arms of the dead. At that moment, I feared the stifling closeness inside more than the few pathetic, undead bastards that littered the fly-over country.

Former Vocations

I.

Something is rotten in my garden.

It was once a man;

his name dangles from

a broken tag on a torn shirt,

a green shirt

from the organic grocery

on the corner.

A vegetarian,

perhaps a vegan?

But now, it

shambles in grey impatience,

snapping its broken-toothed jaw,

dripping strings of

pestilent saliva,

groaning for

the meat

on my bones.

II.

Last summer,

the man brought an audience to

their feet, roaring

for Mark Antony’s revenge--

but the plague

let loose the

dogs of war,

the once-human watchers

of his theatrical game;

his friends, his neighbors, his audience,

fell upon him

chomping and snatching

at scraps of his skin,

rending and tearing

as if to take inside

some bit of the words

he brought to life.

III.

When she taught third grade,

the fence was to keep

the children in,

and she filled their

hungry brains.

Now, she is the worm’s concubine;

her fingers

drape the chain-links,

her flesh hangs in

loose strips,

her eyes

milked-over with cataracts

as she hungers for the

little ones.

But she--it--

is on the outside

and the hunger

is different.

Insatiable.

Foul.

Only slowed by the fence,

never stopping.

Never stopping.

IV.

Walled in her basement studio,

blind eyes staring--

a sort of painter’s block.

Before, when they surprised her at the sink,

the freshly-rinsed brushes

made poor defense

against jaws and fingernails.

Now she gnaws on the canvas,

Pthalo blue smears with

dried brown of human blood.

Too stupid to work the doorknob

with hands torn off at the wrist,

she flails and flails.

Her fluids strike the walls,

an homage to Jackson Pollack.

V.

Old and worn-out.

Retired.

He sat in the rocker on his wide porch,

watching

the first waves stumble and spill

down the street--

a monster of a mob,

all hands and teeth.

Too tired or slow,

he watched them break neighbors’ windows.